


If You Have Ghosts

by fullborn



Category: True Detective
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Maybe everything that dies...someday comes back, Talking To Dead People
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-30
Updated: 2019-06-30
Packaged: 2020-05-28 10:43:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19392481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fullborn/pseuds/fullborn
Summary: Will's dead and buried, but that doesn't mean Tom doesn't see his son in the years that follow. He just might be turning into a ghost himself.





	If You Have Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> I needed to get this idea out of my system, so here we are. After all, if ghost Amelia can show up and solve the whole case then ghost Will isn't _that_ far from reality. Anything to make Tom's life more painful! :)

> _It was just a glimpse of you, like looking through a window_  
>  _Or a shallow sea_  
>  _Could you see me?_
> 
> **Arcade Fire, Afterlife**

***

The first time Tom sees his dead son it’s the day after the funeral and he’s piss-drunk at a bar on the Oklahoma state-line. No matter where he goes there’s always strangers looking at him with pity in their eyes, talking in hushed voices when they think he can’t hear. He hates it. And so he drinks and drinks, choking down whiskey and the ever-present urge to shout his grief aloud until the bartender cuts him off. 

‘I got the money,’ he grunts, struggling with his wallet.

‘Ain’t that, Mr. Purcell,’ the man says with an apologetic shrug. 'Think you’ve had enough is all.’ 

Tom slides unsteadily off the bar stool and the whole room moves with him on its own tripped-out axis. ‘Fuck you,’ he says, and then a little louder: ‘And fuck every one of you, lookin’ at me like that.’ The eyes on him hastily averted as he stumbles to the door, like he’s something gruesome and fascinating. A wreck on the roadside. The father of a dead child. 

Outside, the night snaps cold and bitter. He turns up the collar of his jacket against the wind, makes it all of two feet before needing to steady himself against the rough brick wall of the building. He follows it round to the back of the bar, fumbles with his dick and pisses against the open dumpster. The music from the bar drifts past. Emmylou Harris coming strained and haunted through the high windows, bass in time with the pounding in his head.

As he zips up his jeans his vision twists and spins so dizzyingly he thinks he’s going to be sick. A moment of brief balance as he struggles to stay upright— he sways — and then the blood rushes from his head and he’s falling, slipping down in a heady rush to the black and empty place beyond thought. Dark at last. Silence. But there’s no escaping from reality: if anything it all seems more vivid, the gaping blackness that swallowed his boy’s body into the earth setting to claim him too. If he could, he’d scream. 

It’s all too real as a pale shape steps out of the darkness to crouch at his side. 

The angle’s skewed from the ground but Tom would know his son anywhere. Same jeans and blue coat zipped to the chin, same floppy brown hair falling straight over his forehead, same serious eyes looking strangely adult in a boy’s face.

_'Will,’_ Tom tries to say but his tongue is a leaden paperweight trapping the word in his mouth. 

His boy lays a light hand on Tom’s chest. He’s trying to work his mouth, frowning, nose wrinkling as it always did when he couldn’t figure out one of his math problems. _Hhhh,_ Will says, grimacing, and puts his free hand to the back of his neck as the blood starts to leak around his fingers and into the collar of his shirt and coat. _Hhhhggh -_

Tom’s cheeks are wet with tears as he stares helplessly up at his child; he wants to shut his eyes tight but it’s impossible to look away from Will’s stiffening face. A clear pain shoots through his head fierce and sudden and blinding white, pooling out from his skull like liquid as the blood drips from his son’s head-wound to the ground. 

_Wake up,_ comes Will’s voice, choked and wet. _Dad, wake up._

Tom regains consciousness with the press of gravel digging into his back and a splitting headache — for a second the reality of it seizes his chest like a vice and he can’t breathe, but then he’s rolling over and vomiting into the gutter like it’s the only thing that matters. When it’s over he presses his frozen fingers to the back of his head and lets out something like a whimper.

He still has to return the funeral suit in the morning.

***

‘Dreamt ‘bout Will the other day,’ says Tom into the dead-end space of the living room one night, staring at the can clutched in his hands rather than cut himself on the broken shards of Lucy’s gaze. He can’t stop thinking about the blood. Will’s voice. It all had to have been a dream.

‘Fuck,’ Lucy says from the couch, blowing out a stream of smoke. Acerbic but tired. ‘How're you able to sleep, time like this? Least you got to see him.’

‘You think there’s more to it? Dyin’, I mean.’ 

Lucy just laughs. Buries her cigarette in the ashtray with terrible finality, an answer in itself. 

***

The next time it happens there’s more blood. 

He slips from uneasy sleep into something else, doesn’t need to look to know that Will is standing at his side in the shadow of the ranger tower. It feels natural. It feels horribly wrong. 

He’s only got one shoe.

‘I don’t like it here,’ Tom says. The moon sits huge and orange in the sky, a round flat mirror illuminating the tower in a dread glow. He tilts his face up to see it and feels something wet drip onto his cheek from the staircase above; he blinks in surprise and wipes the spot with his hand. Fingers coming away dark and sticky with blood.

Will looks up at the tower and sighs. ‘I don’t either.’ 

The smear on Tom’s fingertips bleeds into his vision the longer he stares at it, red and indelible and overwhelming — and then he is falling, falling from Roland’s couch and hits the ground with a thump. He struggles to free himself from the blankets, breathing harsh and hard as the dream leaves him and he slowly recognises his surroundings.

‘You okay, man?’ comes Detective West’s voice from the hallway, rough with sleep. His shape barely visible in the surrounding darkness.

‘Fuckin’…bad dream,’ rasps Tom. He’s sweaty, still shaken, pain blooming in his head and ribs as his body takes up the memory of the night before. Roland moves toward him with a concerned frown creasing his face. For a moment Tom thinks he sees a smaller figure standing in the hall beyond and his heart leaps into his throat but then Roland turns on a light, casting the apartment in sharp relief. No child in sight. 

‘You got — ’ says Detective West, gesturing vaguely at his own face. ‘Nose bleedin’ again.’ 

True enough, Tom’s nostrils and moustache are coated in dried blood. ‘Uh,’ he says, feeling his breath hitch in panic as the dream-memory sucks him under like a riptide. Copper taste sharp and dry in his mouth.

‘Come on. Bathroom,’ Roland says. He stands there, tired and strangely endearing in flannel pyjamas and a grey t-shirt worn thin and soft across his chest, hand outstretched to help Tom off the floor. ‘Let’s get you cleaned up.’ 

***

A stretch of time follows where he thinks he might be losing his mind. 

Tom throws himself into the bottom of every bottle he can find, drinks hard and drinks fast. It works for a while. He still has nightmares about Will but the quality is different, unreal and distant: a kaleidoscope image and nothing more. Woodard breaking his son’s skull open in one refracted pattern.

Leaving town comes a relief.

***

He doesn’t see Will for two years, in dreams or elsewhere. It’s even longer before he admits to himself that he’s afraid of his own son - long after he’s run out of places to run. 

The payphone metal is cool against Tom’s forehead, red hospital neon flushing his swollen face where he props himself up outside the emergency room. He thinks his nose is broken and yet he can’t bring himself to go inside — even though pain lances his head every time he breathes. Not that that’s anything new. He’s been hurting in new ways every day since that cold night in November.

It’s dark and the ink has faded but Detective West’s card is still legible after all these years. Despiteall the times Tom returned it unused to his wallet, a little more creased with each near admission of defeat. 

He feeds the machine his last few nickels and punches in the number before he can chicken out. There’s a pause as the dialling tone whirs and clicks in his ear, and he half-hopes the call won’t go through but then there’s a _clunk_ as Detective Roland West picks up the phone one hundred miles away and grunts, _‘Hello?’_

Tom recognises the man’s voice. He doesn’t think he’ll ever forget the way Detective West had said, ‘You might wanna sit down, Mr Purcell,’ back then, with a tone so reverential and kind Tom had known in an instant that the news was bad. Christ. West’s voice had cracked as he told them about the body. 

_‘Anybody there?’_ says West down the line. _‘Don’t take kindly to bein’ woken up in the middle of the fuckin’ night but I’m up now, so let’s have at it.’_

Tom’s about to say something, an apology or a plea or an excuse of some kind but the words wither in his throat as he looks across the parking lot and sees his son perched on the bonnet of an old Cadillac, a book clasped in his hands. Waiting like he belongs there. Will glances up and their eyes meet, and to Tom’s surprise a wide grin lights up Will’s face slow and joyful like the sight of his dad looking beaten to shit in a strange town in another state is the best thing he’s seen since he died.

‘Jesus,’ chokes Tom and the phone clatters against the box as he drops the mouthpiece, leaving West’s canned voice to swing on its cord. He limps across the tarmac and Will smiles even wider as he approaches.

‘I thought I lost you!’ he says. ‘Hey, dad. You look kinda bad.’ 

‘Will,’ Tom says, the shored up pieces of his stability crumbling away at the sight of his boy as he had feared they would. He regards his son steadily. ‘Am I dreamin’? Don’t feel like I’m dreamin’.’

‘You’re awake. Just finally paying attention is all.’

Tom takes a shaky breath, rubs some blood onto his sleeve. ‘Might be I’m losin’ my mind but I’m real glad to see you,’ he says. ‘I'm sorry, kid. Leavin’ you back there all alone.’

Will shrugs. ’S’okay, I never been to Texas before. I like it.’ 

‘Brought you down to my cousins near Corpus Christi when you was a baby but I guess you don’t remember, must’ve been no more’n a year old,’ Tom says, leaning against the fender. ‘Took you to the ocean. Remember you were so little I could float you with one hand like that,’ — bruised palm up toward the night sky — ‘with you wavin’ your arms around like you could’ve swum if I let go. _Tiny Turtle_ , your mom called you for weeks after.’

‘I always thought I’d never seen the sea. Huh.’

‘May not help but you were in it. You n’ me.’ 

‘Yeah.’ Will pushes some of the stray hair from his forehead and the gesture is so familiar it hurts. ‘So, who were you calling? Thought you don’t like using the phone.’ 

‘No one. Just some guy from back home who said he’d help if I needed a hand.’ 

‘Do you?’

Tom feels his throat constrict. ‘Think I might be past help,’ he says, and the tears start to leak down his face as Will takes his hand in a remarkably real grip. Palm cold like dug peat moss but solid all the same. ‘I’m so sorry,’ Tom chokes, holding tight to Will’s hand. ‘For…everything. It’s my fault.’ He sniffs. ‘I let you go and now you n’ Julie are gone for good.’ 

‘Maybe not completely for good,’ says Will, squeezing back. He jumps down from the car and throws his arms wide. ‘Let’s — let’s do something! I’m here now, right? How about playing _Backroads?_ ’

Tom wipes the tears from his chin, thinking of how the kids used to ride in the backseat, pointing and laughing (‘Left! Turn left! - no, right!’) as he took the car down the side streets and country roads surrounding West Finger, how he’d follow their random instructions until they found somewhere good enough to stop and run about. An excuse as any to hustle them out of the house on days when Lucy wasn’t content to aim her ire only at him— but no matter how it started, those outings always ended well. The kids rolling each other in hay piled by an old silo; sliding down piles of quarry chippings covered head to toe in grey dust; eating hotdogs from a roadside vendor stationed in the middle of nowhere. Good days among bad. 

‘Guess I got gas enough,’ Tom says, heads to the car with Will trailing at his side. The car’s a mess. Obvious he’s been living rough from the piles of loose clothing, empty fast food boxes and beer cans he has to move for his son to get in beside him.

Will leans over and twists the keys in the ignition: the engine rumbles to life, headlights flooding the road with possibility. Tom turns in his seat and his heart unclenches for a moment at the easy routine of it. ‘So where to, Captain?’

‘Let’s go right,’ Will says, already preoccupied with the radio dials. ‘Maybe if we drive long enough we’ll end up where you need to be.’ 

So they drive.

***

He doesn’t mean to end up back in Arkansas, but that’s where the road takes him. Reeling him in as if it’s had hooks lodged in his skin the whole time, painful and bleeding and pulling him back home. 

Will can only stay for short stretches at a time, or so he’s learned. It’s not nearly enough. So Tom returns to the place where his son is buried as if that might make it easier for Will somehow, as if physical distance has anything to do with coming back from the dead. But if anything things get worse. The silence becomes more pronounced.

There’s still enough people that remember Tom’s face from the news to make him want to drink, but he keeps to himself when he does — no more drunken bar fights, no Detective West driving Tom home like he was the man’s own personal fuck-up. That chapter of his life is closed, the book burned with all the pages torn out and scattered in the wind.  The last thing Tom expects is to bump into Detective West in the Fayetteville offices of the McIlroy Bank & Trust after being in the state for two weeks. He’s filling out a form with a shitty pen, smudging ink all over his hands when someone lightly touches him on the elbow.

‘Hey,’ comes a voice, deeper and more warm than it had sounded on the phone all those months ago; Tom turns to see Roland West standing behind him, something surprised and gentle blooming in his expression. ‘Tom,’ he says,. ‘Heard you were back in the state — how’re you doin’, man?’

‘Fine. Still goin’,’ says Tom, wiping his fingers on his shirt before taking the man’s outstretched hand. Roland’s wearing his hair differently, brushed back short and a few shades darker, stubble speckling his solid jaw but the expression he wears is the same. Genuine. Almost pleased to see him.

‘That’s good. I, uh…you look different without the moustache.’ Roland gestures to his own upper lip. ‘Almost wouldn’t’ve know it was you. Don’t mean that in a bad way; you’re lookin’ well is what I’m tryin’ to get at.’

‘Thought I’d be dead in a ditch by now, that it?’ grunts Tom, mean-spirited and not sure why. He kicks himself as the smile slips from Roland’s eyes.

‘S’not what I meant. I’m glad you’re doin’ good is all.’ Roland slips a fountain pen out of the breast pocket of his sports coat, hands it to Tom. An electric moment as their fingers touch. ‘Here, try this.’

‘Sorry,’ mutters Tom, lowering his head to scribble out the last few details on the form. 'Didn’t mean to snap at you like that.’

There’s a heavy silence as Roland watches him write, the back of Tom’s neck prickling with his gaze. 

‘You believe this place got robbed last week?’ Roland asks. ‘Why I’m here, collectin’ camera footage. That one’s out of action in case you’re casin’ the joint.’

‘You sayin’ my hundred dollars’s safer elsewhere, Detective?’

‘Shit, think it’s statistically unlikely to get robbed again so soon. If anything your money’s safer, ’less they’re out to make a habit of this sorta thing.’

‘Let’s hope not.’

Tom slips the form into a labelled box, and Roland falls into step beside him as they head for the door. Holds the door open for Tom despite the cardboard box under his arm. 

‘Hey, you free to grab lunch or something?’ Roland says once they’re standing on the sun-cracked pavement outside, awkward and not sure in which direction the other’s headed. ‘Don’t think the office’ll miss me for another hour or so, got a good sandwich joint around the corner if you want to catch up.’

A bunch of kids ride past toward the mall, browned and laughing, fast enough for Tom to imagine Will among their midst. And if not, the rattle of the bicycles chains freeze his thoughts, direct them backwards to the night he first met Roland and his partner. Tom rubs his neck, says, ‘Maybe some other time, Detective.’ 

‘Course,’ nods Roland, flipping on his sunglasses. ‘You, uh, keep well till then, Tom. Good to see you.’ He touches Tom’s arm one last time, and then he’s gone, limping towards a black town car in the far side of the lot. 

Tom clenches his fists, stops before his nails draw blood. Halfway to his car before he notices he’s still holding Roland’s pen.

***

Somehow during their brief reunion Roland slipped back under his skin, to Tom’s chagrin. He ought to be seeing his son — real or imagined — around the town but instead he sees Roland’s clipped haircut, the back of his ridiculous western-style jacket, the unevenness of his gait. He catches himself staring at a gas attendant’s tanned forearms, the thick gold hair on his wrists, and knows he’s got a problem. 

He wakes shamefully hard in his own bed, listens to the sleepy _chuck-chuck_ sounds of his neighbour’s chickens and waits for the feeling to away. Eventually forces himself to get up, shuffles to the fridge and cracks open a Schlitz. Stares long and hard at the crayon picture of a dog pinned to his fridge: Julie’s artwork dated seven years ago in her looping scribble. _To Daddy From Julie_ , a heart in place of the dot over the _i_. 

Tom pops the tab on another beer and drinks.

***

The next time Will elects to appear, it’s been three months since his last visit and Tom is well on his way to getting shitfaced even though it’s barely noon. His day off.

He comes back from the bathroom to find Will with his feet curled up on the sofa, flicking through the channels on the beat-up TV Tom saved from someone’s yard. No doubt discovering all of the ones except the 6-hour religious broadcast come through fuzzy.

Tom drops heavily into the armchair and watches his dead kid. The light from the TV leaves him ghostly and wan, flickering over features that will never change or grow. 

‘Where d’you go, when you go?’ says Tom after a long stretch of comfortable silence. 

Will glances away from the screen, shrugs. ‘Here and there. Backwards and forwards…it’s linear, see? Sometimes I can choose who I visit, sometimes I can’t.’ 

‘You see your mom at all?’ He had called Vegas to give Lucy his new number when he moved but as usual things ended badly. Him drunk, her high more likely than not: a bitter-tongued, unhappy combination. 

‘Yessir. She doesn’t want to see me, most times. Its bad for her.’

‘What…what about Julie?' asks Tom. The words stick in his throat. ‘You get to see Julie?’ 

Will’s face creases for the first time; the can in Tom’s hand buckles under his grip as he waits for an answer. ‘I need her to remember,’ Will explains. ‘She doesn’t…she can see me, sometimes, but she doesn’t know who I am. Makes it hard for me to stay.’

‘Julie’s alive?’ chokes Tom and the beer spills over his hands and onto the floor. ‘She’s…?’ 

‘Yeah. She’s out there. When I break through I can see all this pink, sometimes her face, and then I’m gone again. That’s all.’ 

‘Pink?’

‘I don’t know where she is. I’m sorry,’ Will says quietly. Shoulders hunching as if expecting Tom to shout or at least start crying. As if it’s his fault. 

‘Hey,’ says Tom, getting up and sitting beside him on the couch. ‘Hey.’

‘I couldn’t stop it, they - _they took her and I couldn’t stop them._ ’ 

‘Wasn’t your responsibility,’ murmurs Tom, fatherhood ill-fitting after all this time but he has to try his best. ‘You got nothin’ to be sorry for, kid, you know that right? Will. You were the best big brother a kid coulda had. Best son too.’ 

He puts a tentative hand on his son’s shoulder but it’s like touching a static television screen; the shock has him flinching back. Fingers numb. 

‘Fuck!’ yells Will. Leaps to his feet and glares down at his father with a sudden crackling anger. ‘I fucking hate bein’ dead! I can’t even remember how — how it happened, if I coulda saved her! Just waking up and knowing it was over; being stuck watching all _this_ shit.’ 

The lights dip and stutter as Will flings his arms out in accusation.

‘I get to see my deadbeat dad nearly drown in his own puke, but not where Julie’s at? If I’m goin’ to be dead I don’t want this!’

‘Will…please,’ whispers Tom. Stomach churning with alcohol and guilt. Thinking of him and Lucy screaming even worse things, how the kids never used those words or even let on they heard their parents tearing pieces off each other like a pair of junkyard cats through the walls of their unhappy home.

‘Are you the one keeping me here, huh? That why I’m stuck watching you drink yourself to death instead of resting in peace or whatever’s meant to happen when you get murdered?’ 

‘You’re the one hauntin’ _me!’_ Tom on his feet now, shaking. ‘You’re the one who’s a ghost!’

‘Oh yeah?’ 

There’s a loud electric buzzing over the sound of Will’s heavy breathing; it rises in pitch like the TV’s about to blow. Making the sweat settle cold on Tom’s skin. 

Will stares at him for a moment then lunges forward to grab his bare arm and Tom steps back but it’s too late: there’s a great, wrenching _snap_ and the world rips apart like a tearing elastic band _._ Nothing but Will’s hand hot on his arm — about to burn through to the bone, sensation unbearable — and then —

The world rights itself. They’re standing outdoors. Sky dark and purpling with the promise of either dusk or dawn. 

Tom yanks his arm free, staggers a few paces towards the house on the slope above them. The windows are lit, spilling yellow light onto the patchy earth where Will and Tom are standing: they can just about see the shape of an old man through the glass, seated indoors with a guitar balanced on his lap and his back to them. Plucked notes audible in the quiet air. 

It’s a peaceful scene but it unsettles Tom in a way he can’t describe. _‘What -’_ he tries to ask, but finds he can’t make any sound.

A dog starts barking behind them. First one, then two, then a whole pack of them takes up the call, howling and baying over one another in an unearthly chorus.The guitar stops. A shadow slides across the lawn as the old man gets up and moves to the door, and fear rises in Tom’s throat. He is suddenly, unexplainably afraid.

‘Hey,’ comes a voice as the porch door slides open. ‘What in the hell are y’all barkin’ at, huh? Big possum come back to visit?’

The figure moves forward and Tom prays he won’t be able to see the man’s face — and then the landscape changes and fades again, mercifully sliding into darkness before he can see the truth of the matter as time flings him back into the present. Reality. 

It’s cold in the trailer. Tom collapses to his knees and lets out a sob, heart pounding hard and terrified in his chest even though things are as they left them. Normal. ‘Who was that?’ he rasps. ‘What - what did you do?’ 

Will’s eyes are wide with guilt. ‘I’m sorry,’ he stammers, over and over. ‘I didn’t mean to…I’m sorry.’ He looks pale: he _is_ pale, form shimmering and translucent. Tom can see through his torso to the kitchen counter beyond. ‘Don’t —’

Tom is lifting a hand to his head, for some reason expecting to meet shattered bone and skull. His palm comes away wet with blood; when he blinks it’s gone, and Will is crying. 

‘I’m sorry,’ his son says. The TV flares and goes dead, sparks of electricity scattering across the screen as Will winks into nothingness. 

Leaving Tom trembling and confused. Alone.

***

It fucks him up big time.

‘They think I want to kill myself,’ says Tom, as way of explanation when Detective West comes to pick him up from the hospital. The man just looks at him, steadily examining the dark circles under his eyes, the shirt hanging loose off his shoulders. The old phone number torn and shredded by his nervous fingers. ‘Told ‘em there’s a difference between wantin’ to die and doin’ it yourself.’

‘…Do you want to die?’

‘I just drink. I don’t know. ’

‘Well, you’re comin’ home with me ‘til you do know,’ says Roland. ‘Tom. I’m glad you called. Even after all this time.’

Tom swallows, nearly cracks under the kindness in Roland’s eyes as he allows himself to be led from the ward to Roland’s car. No matter what he does, he has a sick feeling that he’s going to end up on that lawn in front of that house all over again and nothing, not even death, can stop it. 

***

He thought maybe the visions would stop after getting sober but they just get more vivid, more bright. It’s like being shoved into a current. One that’s been tugging at him ever since Will took him _there_. The dream-feeling sucks him under when he’s not paying attention, leaving him fragments of a life that exists beyond his own along with a strange loneliness; when he resurfaces it takes him a few seconds to remember that he’s flesh and blood. Alive. 

He can’t blame Will for losing control, if these small disjointed moments are what being dead is like. It’s disorienting.

‘Man, you’re asleep on your feet,’ Roland says, spotting Tom where he stands spaced out in front of the bathroom mirror. Tom blinks. Pulls himself away from the lure of distant barking as Roland asks, ‘You okay?’

Roland moves into the room and meets Tom’s eyes in the mirror. Unguarded. 

Tom is suddenly painfully aware of how his old undershirt clings wet to his skin from the shower. That and the short distance between their bodies in the cramped bathroom.

He’s wanted to touch and be touched by this man for weeks, so he lets himself reach out and bring Roland’s hand to his neck. Roland stares at hims steadily for a moment, eyes gone dark and wide. Strokes his thumb across his leaping pulse, drags his fingers across the unshaven line of Tom’s jaw before tilting his face down. Tom closes the distance and kisses him. 

And Roland kisses him back, sinking his tongue into his mouth and his hands into his hair as he presses Tom up against the tiled wall and Tom leans into the weight of him, trembling and undone with want. He groans. Runs a hand up Roland’s thigh and palms the length of him through his good trousers, and Roland's too busy leaving a trail of kisses from his neck to his collarbone to do more than let out a sigh -- and then he grips Tom by the belt and shifts close, grinding their hips together. Slow and aching and impossibly real. 

If anything could ground Tom to the here and now, make him less of a ghost, of course it’s Roland. Reminding him his hands are his own. His desire is his own. 

***

It works for a while. But he has no control over the places his dreams lead him.

It’s always the same: observe but not be seen. This time he finds himself outside a bar in a part of town he can’t identify, evening dusty with sticky warmth. A tungsten streetlight casts a pool of light under the trees across the road and reveals a shape huddled on the ground in its orange glow.

Tom approaches the spot in a haze, gets close enough to recognise that the figure is a man before he recognises the man himself with a jolt to the gut. It’s Roland. A few years older maybe, a bit heavier around the middle - but these details are trivial, especially when Roland’s face looks beaten to shit. 

Tom thinks of men with tyre irons. Puts his hand to the swelling on Roland’s cheekbone, feels his blood hot and alive under his fingers. ‘Who did this?’ he murmurs. Wipes the fresh bleeding away with his shirt cuff. ‘ _Roland._ ’

Ice water would have the same effect on Roland’s unconscious form: he jerks awake, eyes snapping open and panicked, hand flying to the cut on his face as if searching for Tom’s absent touch. ‘Fuck,’ Roland groans, heaviness glazing his gaze. He lets his hand drop to his lap. ‘Thought I —’ 

Tom feels his heart skip as Roland’s flickering eyes meet his; it’s only for the briefest of seconds but in it he feels seen, a hard clarity sparking out of drunkenness and desperation. Roland flings his head up to the night sky and starts to laugh. Wild. Tom watches as the laughter turns into racking sobs, as the tears mingle with the blood on Roland’s beaten face. He looks older and more sad than Tom has ever seen him; a stranger to him now, this man who had been nothing if not a steady and kind presence in Tom’s own grief. 

‘What happened to you, huh?’ Tom says, quiet, as Roland takes up a bottle of whiskey from the dirt beside him and fumbles with his cigarettes. Tom sits at his side and breathes in the smoke, the heat of the night, the faint tang of blood. 

A scruffy dog sniffs at the bins by the bar and wanders closer, nose to the ground, uninterested until it stands in front of them. It lifts its head, stiffens with alert curiosity as it seems to look directly at Tom. It’s unmistakable: the dog can _see_ him. 

‘Get outta here,’ says Roland thickly. The dog remains wary, frozen to the spot as it scents Tom out — yet it lets him inch forward and slowly place his hand on its dirty fur. 

‘Go to him,’ whispers Tom. ‘Go on.’  Something in Roland’s expression breaks; the last thing Tom sees before he wakes up is the fading image of Roland sobbing into the scruff of the dog’s neck, solid and comforting in a way Tom can never be. The dog leans into Roland’s sadness and takes it for its own. 

Tom sits up in bed with a stifled cry. He has a horrible suspicion just who the lonely old man may be: he turns to look at Roland, asleep beside him, and his heart sinks as he remembers the blood. Imagines what Roland did warrant such a beating. Wonders if the fault was his own.

‘Hmm,’ Roland grunts, leaning in as Tom wraps his arms around him and holds him tight. Tom buries his face in the crook of Roland’s neck and breathes deep. Closes his eyes.

***

Time stretches on and though he might be lonely he’s not alone, even when he thinks of Roland and Lori and their new house in the suburbs. It starts off with little things: the trailer home door unlocked, books left opened and untidy, VHS tapes played to the end despite his habit of rewinding them once he’s done. Will is back.

‘I ain’t mad,’ Tom says aloud one night. ‘You don’t got to avoid me.’ He goes to the video store and comes back with a movie Will never lived to see, slots the tape in the machine but doesn’t hit play. He falls asleep on the couch and wakes up just in time to see Linda Hamilton ride off into the sunset, and there’s Will, curled up beside him with his blue jacket over his knees. 

***

Somehow Will grows more real as the years go by, his visits more frequent: it seems despite what people say about moving on and letting go the after-death image of his son is getting stronger, not weaker, with time. 

‘How long you think it takes for someone to pass on?’ he asks Father Callahan after bible study one night, stacking the plastic chairs in the far end of the church hall. Father Callahan has blue veins in his hands and tanned forearms under his cassock - it’s easy to imagine him playing tennis when he’s not performing mass. Even if the image seems oddly indecent.

‘Hmm. The only ones with that answer are unfortunately unable to tell us, at least in this life,’ Callahan says. ‘The Lord gives and takes away in his own time. Then again, “In the twinkling of an eye we shall be changed…"’

‘I was more thinkin’ about…purgatory. Like, how long’d you think you have to wait ‘fore movin’ on?’

The priest’s face is too understanding, too kind: he’s new to West Finger but of course he knows. Everyone knows. ‘Ah,’ he says. 'Well, I’m afraid there’s no timeline for that sort of thing. Best we can do is pray for the souls of the dead until our reunion in the coming resurrection.’

‘Mmm,’ grunts Tom. Slams the last few chairs onto the stack and wipes his hands on his jeans. 

‘Tom, your children were innocents. God knows that.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Tom says, turns to go. ‘Don’t think anyone can go through life blameless is all. See you Sunday, Father.’ He raises a hand and exits the hall, but not before he sees the faintly troubled expression on Callahan’s face behind him. 

***

By the time the hint of summer rolls around in 1990, Tom's seeing Will every day. To most other folks this would be an bad omen but Tom barely registers it as abnormal: his dead child has become part of his life. Besides, it’s too late to worry about it. 

Tom puts down the phone, starts buttoning up his shirt and says, ‘They want me to go in to the station. They’ve got something, ‘bout Julie.’ 

‘Okay, Will says, looking up from the reams of graph paper and the scattered pieces on the board before him. They’ve been playing for the past hour but Tom still has no idea how the game works. ‘You rolled a two…that’s a big hit to your health. You’re _this_ close to dying.’

‘Ain’t that lucky when it comes to dice. You win, bud.’ 

‘Dad?’ 

‘Yeah?’

Tom’s too busy fumbling with his cuffs to notice the hesitancy in Will’s voice, but the question stops him in his tracks: ‘Did you love him?’

‘…Who d’you mean?’ Tom rasps, fingers slipping as he tries to resume the task at hand.

His son folds his arms across his chest in an eerie imitation of Lucy. ‘You know who.’

‘Uh,’ Tom says, thinking of Roland and the year they had spent together. His arms. His cock. His gravelly voice, the flash of his grin. The feeling of being on steady ground for the first time in years. Will looks on, unperturbed as Tom’s ears and face burn red and he struggles to find the right words. ‘I - I reckon I did.’ 

‘Then why d’you leave?’

‘It’s complicated. I - it wasn’t right. Didn’t want him to end up like me, with people sayin’…’ Tom trails off, looks down at his hands. ‘It was safer. He got the job, the woman now: good things. He can be happy.’

Will frowns. ‘He looked happy with you.’

‘Guess he was. So was I.’

A look creeps into Will’s eye, a flat grey glint that makes him seems a whole lot older than twelve years old. It reminds Tom that he’s talking to a ghost. ‘You gotta remember that, later,’ Will says. ‘I’ll see you there.’

‘What’s that mean? Will?’ 

But Will has vanished into the air. Tom grabs the keys to his car and locks the door, glances at the abandoned board game through the window as he leaves the trailer for the last time.

***

‘We wanna help you,’ says Roland across the interrogation room, flat and hard and merciless. ‘But we can’t if you don’t talk to us.’ 

Tom’s shaking with rage and confusion, the echo of Will’s words bouncing around his skull as he pushes down the urge to leap across the table and seize Roland by the neck.

He buries his face in his hands instead. Howls. 

***

It takes him three hours and a bottle of Jim Beam to find the place the detectives have failed to find for ten years: he recognises it straight away, despite having never set foot in the underground prison before. Julie was here. 

Will looks up from where he’s sitting on the princess four-poster bed, the expression on his face terribly sad as he watches his father step into the pink room. Tom’s heart lurches as he spots the drawings on the walls. Blood pounding so hard in his head he doesn’t hear the scuff of a shoe in the passage behind him.

‘Julie?’ Tom says, and the world goes from pink to black. 

He’s in a garden. 

Flowers spill out from their containers in a riot of colour, rows of beans and tomatoes climb their trellises to the heavens: it’s all so colourful and alive, filled with the same vivid quality of the places he used to visit in his dreams. A family of finches bicker in the hedgerow and the clouds scud past like water-beetles on the flat blue sky above.

A screen door clatters open and a girl runs past Tom onto the grass. Blonde and nimble, trailing a skipping rope in her hand and laughing as her mother follows her into the garden with a tray of sweet tea — and realisation floods Tom in a wave. He _knows_. 

The birds take flight as he shouts aloud with joy; they spiral up and up like so many answered prayers as he watches his daughter hand her child a glass. Smile wide and real on her grown face. The time isn’t yet come but it will: this child with this woman in their garden. After everything, there’s this.

His body is turning cold near the spot they found Will but it doesn’t matter very much. Julie is happy.

***

Roland has never felt his age as much as he does now, sitting on his porch with an aching head and the prospect of helping Wayne Hays tend to his senile fantasies stretching out before him. He groans. Wonders just what he’s signed up for this time; if _his_ brain is the one going soft, thinking things might turn out different all these years later.

‘I should’ve told him to dig out a magnifying glass, find the answer up his ass,’ Roland grunts to himself. ‘Purple Hays, my man, askin’ me to hold his marbles for him after all these years - like I got hands to fuckin’ spare.’ 

He takes a swig from his hip-flask, doesn’t even flinch as a dry voice comes out of nowhere and says: 

‘Admit it. You’re bored sittin’ up here with nothin but a pack of dogs for company. Don’t it haunt you, a bit, not knowing how it all went down?’

Roland rolls his eyes, and turns to face the un-ageing figure of Tom Purcell where he lounges in his good deck chair. ‘Motherfucker, only thing that’s hauntin’ me around here is you.’ 

‘You’re a detective,’ says Tom, lazily ruffling his unruly hair with one hand so that the loose shirt-cuff flaps around his elbow. ‘It’s in your blood. And besides, how’d you put it?… _I could use a laugh._ ’

‘You’d think this whole “I see dead people” shtick would be handy but I swear, you’re bout asuseful as a ton of bricks to the head. Wanna give me a few hints?’ 

Tom shrugs. ‘Talk to Hays. Maybe y’all’ll solve it, twenty-five years late to the game. Besides. You miss him, don’t you?’ 

‘I miss _you_. When you ain’t bein’ an enigmatic asshole.’

‘You solve this, I ain’t gonna go away y’know. Hate to break it to you, but I’m here til you kick the fuckin’ bucket, old man.’ 

‘Jesus, Tom,’ Roland snorts. ’Til Death Do Us Reunite sounds like a real sappy wedding vow…we get married and I miss it?’ 

The look in Tom’s eye is fond; rough edges gone soft and unafraid. ‘Runnin’ about again with a badge and gun, tryin’ to avenge my murder: don’t the thought make you half-hard? Just a bit?’ 

'That’d be a bigger miracle than conversin’ daily with the dead on my porch. You forget, I got old somewhere along the line.’

‘Not so old as to not beat me at chess. Your turn.’ 

They turn their attention to the carved chess set laid out on the table, the pieces positioned midway through a match even though Roland knows he had them laid out in their neat rows since their last game. It’s no use thinking too hard about how Tom navigates in and out of time and his life as he’s done one way or another these past two decades.

If he squints his eyes the right way, he can just about see a faint shadow standing at Tom’s side. Sign of an old man’s failing eyesight but Roland knows better. 

‘You tell that boy of yours to go easy on me,’ he grunts, moving his queen out centre-stage with a flourish. ‘Two against one’s hardly fair but I like to think I can take the pair of you cheatin' good-for-nothins with one hand behind my back.’ 

The smile spreads slow across Tom’s face, surprised and amused all at once. ‘Well shit,’ he says, and Roland swears he hears the sound of a boy let loose a burst of laughter that rises out over the sound of the dogs and into the wide open sky like a volley of firecrackers. 

No woman. No kids. Just a pack of dogs and plenty of time to reflect on his past failures — no wonder Wayne Hays looked at him with such pity, seeing the isolated house on the hill and thinking exile, thinking a sad existence for a man made for company. But Roland’s never been lonely. 

He has his ghosts after all. 

**Author's Note:**

> My [Writing Playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4ryNgc933lFASY9dBUa8sr)
> 
> Also featuring ['Store'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xyo1p4pZATw) and ['Keeping House'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRthl4th7OE) by the Mountain Goats, but unfortunately they're not available on Spotify.
> 
> Comments appreciated!


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